Speed of NaNoWriMo Causing a Few Problems

Here’s a little problem I’ve discovered with NaNoWriMo this year. Writing fast is making me sloppy.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. There’s an old freelancers’ proverb for clients that goes, “Good, fast, cheap. Pick two.” The idea being that you can have any combination of two of those qualities on the work you hire, but you cannot have all three. If you want it fast and cheap, don’t expect it to be good.

We’ve been in the read-aloud process for Little Red Riding Hoodie — my major project during this NaNoWriMo. I was hoping to have the final draft completed Friday, so I could submit to Kindle Scout.

But there’s been a little snag.

We keep finding continuity errors. One of them is going to require me to rewrite a scene and then go through the whole manuscript and make sure all other references to it are accurate.

That’s not what this stage of the edit is supposed to be about. We should be working on finding any glaring typos and getting the language just right, not finding major problems.

Since this has never happened before, I can only attribute it to the accelerated pace of the writing. I wrote the first draft in two weeks and all subsequent drafts in a week or less. Up until this point, I was kind of proud of myself.

Ordinarily, speed wouldn’t be a problem for NaNoWriMo. The idea is to just get the words down. You fix problems in the subsequent drafts.

But since I’m trying to get a book all the way from start to finish in a month, it’s a bit more of an issue.

So I’m going to need to take a little more time  with this book to make sure I get it right. Because publishing a good manuscript is more important to me than getting it done fast.

Of course, I’ll be trying to fix these problems as quickly as possible.

Filed under: e-Publishing, NaNoWriMo, Writing Tagged: John Phythyon, Little Red Riding Hoodie, NaNoWriMo